Holy DreamBot Finalized (we think)

NDC Headline #16: “Announcement made on September 23rd, 2014, during communion from the Vatican’s St Peter square, reverberates throughout the Catholic world.”

As you’ll soon see, we have a very bizarre “hit” on this headline, and it happens to have been published on the proposed date, from the exact predicted location. Interestingly, September 23 turns out to be a busy day for the Pope. Let’s see what announcements were made, starting the most unrelated news and working our way toward the most related:

“Pope Francis has named Australian theologian Tracey Rowland among the new female members of the International Theological Commission.

The Vatican announced her appointment this morning, along with those of Sister Prudence Allen RSM, Sister Alenka Arko, Dr Moira McQueen and Prof Marianne Schlosser.”

Notes: Being how women are still climbing out of that highly patriarchal paradigm, this headline is still significant, but it is nonetheless fairly irrelevant to our prediction, for it probably will not make a lot of waves “reverberating throughout the Catholic world.”

This one was sad, but not particularly surprising, per se. On 23 September, “Former Vatican envoy placed under house arrest” due to allegations of child sex abuse. It does happen to be “one of the highest ranking church officials to be accused of abusing children”…and “It is the first time a top Vatican ambassador has faced such charges.”

This directly relates to the Pope prediction because he announced his express desire “so that a case so serious and delicate would be addressed without delay.”

ROME, Italy — Pope Francis has changed the name of St. Peter’s Basilica to “Tiber Creek Community Church,” Vatican spokesperson Fr. Federico Lombardi announced this morning.

“The greatest church of Christendom, built on the holy grave of the martyr-prince of the Apostles, has been known as ‘St. Peter’s Basilica’ for 1700 years,” Fr. Lombardi explained. “It was long overdue for a rebranding.”

He continued that this was just the next step in Pope Francis’ greater program of trying to make the church more relatable to the average person.

Here’s the thing, though. The joke has made it fairly big on the internet, including reddit where someone said, “I wonder how many people will take this seriously.” I found at least 4 other references to this article, so even though it was a joke, it apparently made enough ripple in the collective unconscious to be “seen” ahead of time in the dreams and dreambot run.

A Tickle

As far as scoring goes…before this article came out, I had no way to score this sequence. Because it didn’t actually happen, technically this news would be called “a tickle,” and we had no consideration in our new scoring for tickles like we did in Project August.

A tickle in Project August occurred when a news agency predicted something that we already predicted. For example, we predicted a vacant community due to an unprecedented drought. Two months later, news agencies were talking about how they may have to start migrating people out of California.

Thus, our prediction of people vacating due to the drought technically didn’t come true because no one had migrated. However, it did come true because mass media talked about it and warned about it. It didn’t deserve a full score since people weren’t actually moving out in real life, but it didn’t deserve a zero, either, since mass media was parroting the predictions we had made two months prior.

Therefore, we call these situations “Tickles.” The prediction came true, but only by a tickle. As you might be able to imagine, trying to decide how to decrement something like a tickle is extraordinarily difficult. So rather than inducing subjectivity here, we simply created a new category of scoring…the Tickle, which is indicated by (T) before the score.

Three criteria for a Tickle score: 1) the article “hit” must be from a link that affords thousands of viewers (or the combination of links affords thousands to see the news/prediction/warning/etc.) In other words, the news has to be big. 2) Next, start the score with a (T) for “Tickle,” meaning the event didn’t really happen, but is hypothetically referenced or predicted by the media. 3) Finally, score everything as you normally would.

For example, in the drought headline, the score would be (T)5–4–3. The T means that the event didn’t really happen, but media either referenced it as if it almost happened or will happen or some sort of hypothetical discussion relates to the prediction.

Scoring for this Tickle

Once again, we post the original headline:

NDC Headline #16: “Announcement made on September 23rd, 2014, during communion from the Vatican’s St Peter square, reverberates throughout the Catholic world.”

…and we begin with the easy stuff: The WHEN is a no-brainer. It receives a max score of 5 out of 5 because the date of September 23rd was predicted correct, to the day.

As for the WHERE, well, that also is granted full points because not only was the alleged “announcement” made from the Vatican, which is within one block of Tiber Creek Community Church (oops, I meant St Peter’s Basilica). Thus full 5 points.

Now for the WHAT component. Under our new guidelines for scoring tickles, we need the subject and verb to be correct as well as one other descriptor. I can already see that the headline I generated was poorly worded, because I fully intended the Pope to be the main character in the prediction because the Pope was in our linguistics profile. Nonetheless, the whole sentence is correct except perhaps the communion aspect. Even reverberating is correct as people do double takes on the “announcement,” wondering if it was a hoax. Nonetheless, I decrement 0.5 for the communion aspect that doesn’t appear to be associated here, and we end up with:

Tickle Score: (T)4.5-5-5(remember, the T simply means that the event did not actually take place in real life, but our prediction is somehow being discussed in the media.)

Caution: One must not compare scores from regular scores (those without the T) to tickle scores (those with the T). We only compare apples to apples. For scoring comparisons, Tickles compare to tickles and nothing else. Right now, the only tickle score in existence is this Basilica news. Thus, there is nothing to compare it to.

.

---------- NDC Announcments -----------

Don’t miss our daily DreamBot run which shows a brief status of the collective unconscious.